Four or five degrees of separation

I was at the bookstore browsing for nothing in particular, and I spotted The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion and took it down for a look. There were other Cambridge Companions listed in the front and back, and they were all religious – which is not surprising, since I now see on the CUP site that it is in the series Cambridge Companions to Religion. Not Cambridge Companions to Science, but Cambridge Companions to Religion. Not Cambridge Companions to both religion and science, but Cambridge Companions to Religion – despite the fact that Science gets top billing in the title.

Well that seems to confirm an impression I’m always getting from this Sci&Relig stuff, which is that it’s a religious endeavor, period. The outreach is all on one side. Science doesn’t have any interest in yoking the two, or in trying to create a discipline in which the two are yoked; but religion apparently has an enormous amount of interest in that. Religion, apparently, wants to try to siphon off some of the prestige of science for its own more dubious ventures, and this is one of the wheezes it is currently trying.

I read some of the introduction by the editor, Peter Harrison. In the last paragraph, he says something to the effect that: you may notice that none of the essays defend the idea that science and religion are in conflict; this is not because of any bias but because nobody who knows much about the subject thinks that that idea has any legs.

Uh. Sounds like any bias to me, I thought. So later, I did a little googling – I looked up Peter Harrison. I was wondering, among other things, if I would find any mention of the Templeton Foundation anywhere. Well I won’t keep you in suspense – I did.

Harrison is the Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College (which I have to admit is a college I’ve never heard of), and also connected in some way to something called “The Ian Ramsey Centre for science and religion in the University of Oxford.” What the hell is that? you may wonder. It’s “part of the Theology Faculty in the University of Oxford. It has the special aim of promoting high quality teaching and research in the exciting field of science and religion.” Aaaaaaaaand

And on this page we also find that Peter Harrison is the director of this Centre. A previous director, Dr Arthur Peacocke, won the Templeton Prize in 2001.

So Peter Harrison turns out to have a pretty close connection to Templeton.

By that I don’t mean that he’s a creation or a creature of Templeton – from his bio it’s clear that he’s been interested in religion and philosophy and/or science since he was a student. I just mean that Templeton money seems to have a good deal to do with his career, and that that fact is of interest. Templeton money is successfully promoting the idea of a connection between science and religion, so successfully that it has indirectly helped to produce a book as prestigious as a Cambridge Companion on its pet subject, that treats it in the approved way – a way that disparages the “conflict model” of the relationship between science and religion, and puts a high scholarly gloss on the contentious claim that that model is an old piece of crap.

So they want to have a dialogue, so long as scientists who disagree with them shut-up and don’t say anything. Maybe they could give us some Free Speech Zones where we’ll be allowed to (very quietly) say what we think.

The entire foundation of Christianity is the Original Sin of Eve, into which she beguiled Adam. Sin and redemption sums up the entirety of Catholicism, Protestantism and the various Eastern rites. I think the same goes for Judaism and Islam. Take away Original Sin, and what rationality there is to be found in the whole concoction evaporates. It is the (greatest) Achilles Heel of Abrahamic religion.

Religion has not contributed much to science, but science can contribute a huge amount to religion, specifically by working out the mechanism of hereditrary transfer of the Original Sin from generation to generation, and thus getting rid of this damned Achilles Heel.

I wonder if I could get a research grant for this project from the Templeton Foundation. Or would I be wasting my time applying?

This kind of thing is actually very troubling. It means that there is a group of people out there are who quite prepared to lie in an apparently academic book for chiefly ideological reasons. Becasue Peter Harrison knows — that is, he knows– and he can’t help but know — that there are people, quite respectable scientists, who do think that this idea — that science and religion are in fact incompatible — does have legs, and yet he claims that it doesn’t. What he is speaking about is a new academic field (one to which Karl Giberson also belongs) whose purpose is to study the compatibility of religion and science. That assumption, clearly, is built into the field. That is its underlying premise. What Templeton has done is really quite a coup. It is not only funding people who will support this view; it seems to have managed in effect to create an field of academic study in which this view is taken, not only as true, but as unproblematically true, foundationally true, in fact. That, I take it, is really the meaning of your last sentence:

Templeton money is successfully promoting the idea of a connection between science and religion, so successfully that it has indirectly helped to produce a book as prestigious as a Cambridge Companion on its pet subject, that treats it in the approved way – a way that disparages the “conflict model” of the relationship between science and religion, and puts a high scholarly gloss on the contentious claim that that model is an old piece of crap.

This strikes me as a very worrying development, that there is a new academic specialty which is essentially an offshoot of theology, but pretends to speak with authority about science. Besides your exploration in the uni book store, Matthew Reisz’s piece in the HuffPo makes the same assumption. He quotes from the Science and Religion volume in the OUP Very Short Introduction series where, we are told, the conflict theory is the product of the way science reporting is done. In other words, it’s just an illusion produced by a sensationalist press. There is no conflict. Science and religion are compatible, full stop.

What we need to do is to explore this compatibility. What we are not told is that this is a religious datum, not the outcome of critical enquiry. I said once, quite some time ago, that religion does not acknowledge boundaries. This is an example. Since religion has no critical ground, and speaks inevitably in vague, woolly generalities, it can produce apparent compatibilities everywhere. Just read some of the religious history of the Enlightenment, where claims are made that Christianity is the source of critical thinking, science, human rights, equality, compassion, etc. etc. These things are all based on boundary violations, because religion is not a definitive field of knowledge, but whatever the person at the time says that it is. Before there can be a field of study of the relationship of science and religion, there must first be a definitive understanding of what religion is, and what claims it makes, and the foundation for those claims. Until then, science and religion is just comparing apples and oranges. And apples and oranges are only compatible in the sense that if you masticate them, mix them with stomach acid, they turn eventually into chyme, where neither is distinguishable from the other. The eventual product of this process is crap!

Indeed; I find it very troubling too; that’s why I made some effort to look into the connections. Templeton is surprisingly and alarmingly good at insinuating itself into places like Cambridge and Oxford and thus making various ventures look both more independent and more scholarly-respectable than they would otherwise look. This Ian Ramsey outfit looks like some kind of shifty front organization right out of “I Was a Communist for the FBI,” yet it is somehow part of Oxford – via the Faculty of Theology.

Talk about dishonesty. Handbooks and companions often have pieces of varying quality; even by their own biased standards, is there *nothing* worth including on the other side or absolutely no possible contributer to be commissioned to create something? I find it incredible that they’d bother claiming such a thing. Wedge strategy, anyone? This does also reflect badly on CUP period … I wonder how they go about selecting topics.

Though the handbook may be dishonest in claiming that no one thinks science and religion are in conflict, there is a plausible reason why the idea is not voiced more often from the science perspective. That ideas are organized into systems that may or may not conflict is itself a bizarre notion. Leaving aside speculative philosophy, a field few scientists care about, how does an idea “conflict” with science? Ideas can either be formulated in a way that can be tested or not, or they don’t state facts about the world but may be about other ideas. That’s pretty much it. There is no sense to be made of the notion that ideas form rival systems unless you are a dualist, in which case rival systems and conflicts seem natural and obvious. What scientists do see is rival theories, but that’s within science, not outside of it posing a challenge.

The programme on the service looks like a programme about the triumph of science over religion, but this is a manipulation, the programme is framed by Thomas Dixon’s opinions about the limitations of science. And he has the gall to say at the end of the programme that faith gives something science cannot give: meaning and purpose. This manipulation seemed to go unnoticed by many atheists who thought the programme was pro-scientific or pro-atheist.

Ah-ha – and Thomas Dixon is the author of the OUP Science and Religion: a Very Short Intro – which Eric cited above. It all makes sense.

So OUP tacitly endorses the idea that the new “discipline” equates to a near-dogma, certainly a starting point, that science and religion are indeed compatible and can fruitfully interact. This will be news to a lot of scientists, I should think.

While maintaining rigorous qualifications for membership (membership is through nomination by existing members only) the Society has now grown to over 140 members, including many of the leading scholars in the science and religion field. Indeed the last two presidents, George Ellis, a theoretical cosmologist and Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town, and John Polkinghorne, are both recipients of the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities – the world’s best-known religion prize, awarded each year to a living person to encourage and honour those who advance spiritual matters.

On the links page it has more than one link to “the Faraday Institute” – a Templeton creation. To that there Ian Ramsey Centre. To the Templeton “Fellowship” program. To various X Religion and Science sites – and to nothing just plain scientific at all. As always, it’s totally one way – it’s about goddies trying to hook up to science, it’s not about science trying to hook up with goddies.

What they’re doing is creating a self-repeating web of legitimization. They’re members of a slew of academicky-sounding Societies and Centres and Institutes which are actually just religious chat-shops – though Harrison and Dixon (at least) have real credentials as well.

Why the Science and Religion Dialogue MattersVoices from the International Society for Science and ReligionEdited by Fraser Watts and Kevin Dutton

Each world faith tradition has its own distinctive relationship with science, and the science-religion dialogue benefits from a greater awareness of what this relationship is. In this book, members of the International Society for Science and Religion (ISSR) offer international and multifaith perspectives on how new discoveries in science are met with insights regarding spiritual realities.

The essays reflect the conviction that “religion and science each proceed best when they’re pursued in dialogue with each other, and also that our fragmented and divided world would benefit more from a stronger dialogue between science and religion.” In part one, George F. R. Ellis, John C. Polkinghorne, and Holmes Rolston III, each a Templeton Prize winner, discuss their views on why the science and religion dialogue matters. They are joined in part two by distinguished theologians Fraser Watts and Philip Clayton, who place the dialogue in an international context. In part three, writers look at the distinctive relationships of their faiths to science…

But yes, I agree with your suspicions, that this is part of some kind of wedge agenda to push religion into scientific academia, to try and get religious belief as a legitimate and authoritative academic subject on par with science.

Materialism is indeed self-contradictory if it asserts as true the proposition that ‘only public observations of physical phenomena in space and time can count as evidence for true beliefs’, since the evidence for the truth of this proposition cannot be any set of public observations. It will not do to say that the proposition is not a truth, but simply a declaration that one will not count anything but public observation as evidence. If such a declaration is to be reasonable rather than quite arbitrary, it must be based on something like the consideration that only public observations provide useful or fruitful knowledge. But that begs the main question at issue: are our subjective experiences of value and transcendence, our struggles to understand our own lives and learn how to live well, all useless and fruitless? Are our often agonised attempts to find meaning in our lives, to face up to the anguish of despair and death, to find something worth-while in our inner struggles, to be consigned to being pointless by-products of unconscious material processes?

Yes, the position that knowledge proceeds only from observations and reasoning about them does in fact stem from the “consideration” that this is what we do and no other approach works. How do Wards “subjective experiences” and “struggles” and “agonized attempts” beg the question? Is “despair and death” incompatible with naturalism? I’m stumped. Does Ward think he can bypass the question about how we might know differently from the way we do by an appeal to how much pain naturalism gives him?

Ernie: According to your quote, Ward says “Materialism is indeed self-contradictory if it asserts as true the proposition that ‘only public observations of physical phenomena in space and time can count as evidence for true beliefs’, since the evidence for the truth of this proposition cannot be any set of public observations.”

Sorry Ward, it can, and does so all the time. The ‘true belief’ that the Sun will rise tomorrow is based on the public observation that it rose today, yesterday, the day before that and so on, in a regression going back through all recorded history and into geological time. This ‘true belief’ will be tested again tomorrow morning, and if found wanting will have to be modified, or scrapped entirely.

If I had to have heart surgery, I would far rather it done by a surgeon whose training was evidence-based, and not faith-based. Perhaps in some obscure corner of the planet there is a quack whose bible is Galen, but if there is, the world is not exactly beating a path to that quack’s door. Human preference solved this problem before human sophistry created it.

Ophelia (#19) You quote Watts and Dutton as saying: “The essays reflect the conviction that “religion and science each proceed best when they’re pursued in dialogue with each other…”

Theologians should always be aware of the latest developments in science so that they can make the necessary adjustments and refinements to their ever-evolving gods. The god of the gaps tends towards the god of the nooks and crannies, and from there to god of the crevices and hairline cracks.

However, I am not aware of any area of science where the practitioners have to get themselves up to speed on the latest refinements in theology before they can proceed with confidence in their own field.

If the Universe was ordered differently, with an intelligent source subject to empirical study, theology would be the bedrock of all science. But it ain’t so in this universe.

Ian, well Ward is right about that particular bit, because it would be question begging to say that only public observations of physical phenomena in space and time can count as evidence for true beliefs and the evidence for the truth of this proposition is public observations. You see? That would be to affirm what you’re attempting to prove; thassa no-no.

Ophelia: This is one of those problems that human practice solved before human ingenuity invented it. If ‘only public observations of physical phenomena in space and time can count as evidence for true beliefs’ is to be not true, then something other than ‘public observations of physical phenomena in space and time’ must either (a) also be acceptable or (b) be exclusively acceptable in place of it as evidence for true beliefs.

What that something other might be, I confess I have not the faintest idea. I had a visit from the Angel Gabriel half an hour ago (you’ll just have to take my word for it), and he could not think of what it might be either. But before he flew away, he did ask me to remember that all mathematics is based on axioms, and language likewise, and that thought and knowledge are impossible without language.

According to Ernie’s quote, Ward cites his innermost thoughts and feelings as being beyond the scope of ‘public observations of physical phenomena in space and time’ and at the same time evidence for true beliefs. But is that really the case? Personal beliefs that one holds to be true can also include delusions, and it is stretching it a bit to call these ‘true’ in anything like an absolute sense, eg in the way that 2+2 = 4 is ‘true’. Those innermost thoughts and feelings however can be tested by comparison with those experienced by others, and the more commonly they occur, the more ‘valid’ and understandable in that sense they become. But to the extent that happens, they become ‘public observations of physical phenomena in space and time’ – like, say, the case books of Dr Sigmund Freud.

Does anyone have a comprehensive list of all the “foundations” and “societies” and “centres” which are essentially Templeton front organizations? I think a website giving such a listing is in order.

P. S. Does the Templeton Foundation (or any of its senior members) have any reputation for being litigious? They certainly have the financial resources for a spot of vexatious litigation. Is there any chance that they might respond to a truthful attack by “doing a Scientology”?

I’ve been dismayed by some of the misinformation going around in the wake of the recent BBC Four programme I presented and a related online article I wrote for the BBC News magazine. Just for the record, I am a historian, not a theologian (although my first degree was indeed in Theology and Religious Studies), and membership of ISSR is open to anyone who has made a scholarly study of relations between science and religion, as I have. As I explain in the Preface to my ‘Very Short Introduction’, my aim is to use the history and philosophy of science to shed light on this topic, and not to try to persuade anyone to become either religious or atheistic. My own approach is entirely agnostic.

Thomas Dixon, many thanks for your comment. I hope I haven’t misrepresented you. (I don’t mention you on this post, actually, but on a follow-up post, Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes .)

What you say about the ISSR is compatible with what I said about it, I think. It does have very close ties to the Templeton Foundation, and the Templeton Foundation is not agnostic. I think what goes on with these ties and intersections is that Templeton gives itself prestige via its connection with people like you. Do you worry about that at all, or do you think it’s just a non-issue?

[...] the Science-n-religion question Oct 7th, 2010 | By Ophelia Benson Category: Notes and Comment Blog Thomas Dixon commented on one of the recent posts on this issue, and I thought it only fair to make his comment more [...]